Marte Latham was warned against venturing into the remote, unexplored jungles of Colombia without a military escort. It’s too dangerous, state department officials said. But she got tired of waiting. Giant earthworms could be found in those jungles. There was no time to waste.
So into the rugged rainforest went Mrs. Latham, packing a Winchester 88 rifle and accompanied only by native Colombians. Experts scoffed and said this housewife from Mt. Lebanon would never find the worms. It was the summer of 1956. The last reported sighting of the worms had come 26 years earlier.
High in the Andes Mountains, Mrs. Latham hired one of the native Colombians to dig a hole. Six feet down, Mrs. Latham found what she was looking for: worms that measured as long as 5 feet. She found 11 of the slimy beasts, packed them in crates marked “Precision Instruments” to ensure safe handling, and brought them to the United States, where they ended up in places like the Smithsonian Institution.
Mrs. Latham, a Pitt graduate, was described in Pittsburgh newspapers as an explorer, a research scientist, a naturalist, a “huntress,” a dealer in wildlife and “Queen of the Jungle.” By the mid 1950s, she was living with her family along Pearce Mill Road in Wexford and making frequent trips to South America to find rare animals. Her travel kit contained a toothbrush, a machete, a .38 snubnose revolver and lipstick.
Her Wexford house became a sort of menagerie that included animals such as an anteater, a slender loris, a boa constrictor and a variety birds and turtles.
By the early 1960s, Mrs. Latham had written a book titled “My Animal Queendom” and was appearing on television programs such as “To Tell the Truth” and “The Tonight Show.” Newspapers reported that she’d discovered a tiny frog that produced one of the most powerful poisons on Earth, and had them sent to scientists seeking new drugs for human ailments.
But it wasn’t all science and research for Mrs. Latham. She had a flair for fashion. On her head, Mrs. Latham sometimes wore live plumage. She trained canaries, parakeets and an Australian cockatiel named Sir Topper to perch nearly motionless atop spring hats. She claimed she’d worn such a hat into department stores and had walked through crowds without ever losing a bird.
